Overcrowding in African hospitals is attributed to the lack of health facilities and doctors, especially in rural areas.

According to the United Nations, there is only one doctor for every 5,000 people in Africa, a continent that bears 25 percent of the world’s disease burden. But with the number of mobile phone users on the rise, some technological innovations are helping to bridge the gap between doctor and patient and expand healthcare coverage.

Yaw Asamoah is the head of MedPharma Care in Ghana. The company has developed an app that allows patients to contact doctors and pharmacists online and have medicines delivered to their homes.

He says the system improves patients’ experience when using medical services.

“This is where MedPharma Care comes in. We want to figure out how we can digitize the whole concept of healthcare and introduce telemedicine. So people can get electronic consultations and prescriptions and have their medicines delivered anywhere, be it to their office or home. They can get their diagnosis done remotely,” said Asamoah.

According to the World Health Organization, 57 countries suffer from a critical shortage of health workers, 36 of them in Africa.

The Abuja Declaration of 2001 requires the countries of the African Union to spend 15 percent of their annual budget on health. Most governments have not yet met this requirement.

Funding and infrastructure problems have prevented millions of Africans from accessing quality healthcare, but experts say digital tools could improve access to services in hard-to-reach areas where doctors are scarce.

Mountaga Keita is a Guinea-born businessman who invented three portable diagnostic terminals that can monitor a patient’s temperature, blood pressure and heart function and perform ultrasound scans.

“The benefit is that doctors and patients have less time to overload hospitals,” Keita said. “Now doctors and nurses can access the patient data they have collected and send it to hospitals in a very secure way, where they can analyze it and bring it back to the patient.”

Keita has so far distributed 40 kits to various hospitals in Guinea.

Keita said the diagnostic terminals have attracted the attention of other countries such as Gabon, which has ordered six machines. He is in talks with the governments of Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast and Senegal to supply the kits there.

Keita said his technology could help solve the doctor-patient relationship problem and save patients money.

“With this type of technology, all of a patient’s vital signs can be transmitted in an encrypted, very secure way to a specialist in Tunisia, Kenya, Tokyo or Paris, who will evaluate and communicate the results,” he said. “Then we will know whether we need to spend 45,000 euros on evacuation… or whether we can cure the person on the spot.”

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, telemedicine has seen significant growth and attention in Africa.

Asamoah said telemedicine provides access to many doctors specializing in different diseases, thus easing the burden on health facilities.

“In Ghana, if you go to a clinic and want to speak to a specialist, you usually can’t get one because you don’t have an appointment or because you’re not available,” he said. “However, telemedicine can allow you to make an appointment and speak to any doctor you want.”

McKinsey & Company, a global management consulting firm, analyzed the impact of digital health tools in Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa and found that the tools could reduce the continent’s overall healthcare costs by 15% by 2030.